I am writing this down now, so in one year or so I can say, "I told you so!"

Here is how you'll experience and pay for flying in the future. It has to do with the use of cell phones. In the US, the Federal Communications Commission is considering allowing cell phone use on flights. And when I traveled to Forrester's Customer Experience Forum in London just this week, my Virgin Atlantic flight already allowed us to use our mobile phones to roam the cell phone skies.

It won't be long, and we'll all be able to use our mobile devices to talk to our friends and colleagues on airplanes — much like we already do on trains.

And —in style — airlines will charge for the advantage: by requiring a separate charge, by charging a fee for seat selection generally like Scoot, or by making the quiet zone part of a higher class, like Economy Plus.

Do you know what the right metrics are to measure your customers' experience? Do you know how to make the best use of the metrics to improve the customer experience?

If you cannot measure the customer experience, you cannot manage it. And that means that you will never move beyond the find-and-fix approach that characterizes the "repair" stage on the path to customer experience maturity.

So join me and your peers in the Forrester Workshop, Customer Experience Measurement Essentials, in Cambridge, Mass., on October 24th.

This workshop is a great opportunity for all CX professionals to:

Learn Forrester's framework for measuring the customer experience: how to identify the right metrics to measure CX and how to make the best use of CX metrics.

We are working on a new report on the voice-of-the-customer (VoC) vendor landscape 2013.

The report will provide a guide to the current landscape of the VoC vendor market as well as the features and services currently delivered by a variety of vendors and will show where we see the growth potential in the future.

To all CX and CI professionals who use VoC vendors: We would love to hear about your experience with your current and past vendors. If you would like to take part in this research, please reach out to Corey Stearns (cstearns@forrester.com).

To all VoC vendors: We just launched a vendor landscape overview survey. If you help companies listen to, interpret, share, and act on customer feedback and haven't received the survey, please reach out to Corey Stearns (cstearns@forrester.com).

With fall coming up, I was reminiscing about my summer. And funnily enough, one of the lower moments had to do with free ice cream. Whole Foods had advertised an “Ice Cream Social” on a Saturday in July — free ice cream from 2 to 5pm. By the time my husband and I managed to squeeze my 8-week-old daughter and one set of grandparents into our car and drive there, it was 4:30pm. But that was still before 5pm, right? Yeah. Unfortunately, when we entered the store, there were no signs of an ice cream social anywhere. Turns out, the store had run out of ice cream earlier. What a bummer! Now all of us had to trudge back into the car without having eaten the ice cream we were all much looking forward to.

Now you might say “stop whining” since the ice cream was free. But here is the thing: Even though we certainly had no right to expect anything in the first place, Whole Foods changed the game by promising something. We were upset because Whole Foods didn’t deliver on its promise. And you know what? Only a few weeks later, it happened all over again! Whole Foods hosted an event in which people could bring back their used toothbrushes and get new ones. Guess what? When we got there, they only had toothbrushes for left-handed people left. Given that left-handed people only represent about 10% of the world’s population that was very disappointing and started to feel like a marketing gimmick.

Are you trying to take your current customer experience measurement to the next level?

Many of the customer experience professionals we talk to regularly are working on improving their customer experience measurement. You are probably one of them. You might be working on picking the right metrics, on connecting customer experience to business outcomes or to operational variables, on using data to improve the customer experience, or on getting traction for CX measurement in your organization. To conquer any or all of these challenges, you need a solid and well-founded customer experience measurement framework.

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My colleague Megan Burns and I have just published our new report "Executive Q&A: Customer Experience Measurement" in response to all the great questions we’ve been getting about measuring customer experience. To measure customer experience (CX), firms need a framework that tells them not only how good their customers' experiences are but also how to improve them and what benefits to expect from doing so. Increasingly, companies are developing such a framework despite facing sometimes-major obstacles.

This report answers some of the most common questions customer experience professionals agonize over when it comes to CX measurement.

One of those questions we are often asked is, “What does it mean to measure customer experience?” Here is the answer. Forrester defines CX as: how customers perceive their interactions with an organization. Therefore, fundamentally, to measure customer experience is to measure customers' perceptions of their interactions with a firm.